


Ballad in Plain D (Not Talk Falsely)

by NicoleAnell



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-19
Updated: 2008-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 01:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoleAnell/pseuds/NicoleAnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a characters of color challenge. The prompt was <i>Tory/Anders, hurt/comfort, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief."</i> AU after "Crossroads".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ballad in Plain D (Not Talk Falsely)

They don't allow Tory and Sam to see each other.

She gets this. This makes more sense than anything has in a while. Still, Tory still feels cheated out of some kind of secret Cylon communication method. She always thought it could be a given -- in the illogical nightmare part of her brain, she supposed -- for the Cylons to talk to each other from afar. She believed they were magic. Not _magic_, exactly, but something close enough. A side effect of interviewing and documenting and exit-polling is being steeped in other people's fear nearly every day; when she's not exhausted with it, it's easy to embrace like common sense. She absorbs the fear like it's hers, but at a distance, so she can still put it in medians and analyze the trends in scales of one to five.

The powers Tory would like to have are: to communicate with other Cylons, Samuel Anders in particular, and to control minds en masse for only moral reasons, like securing good leadership for the fleet. Another lesser power is: to control time.

This is her new dream. In the holding cell, among the amenities she's allowed, she still has her watch, which keeps a calendar and has three separate slots for alarms. She knows it's been eight days. Some interns must be crushed under her old schedule by now. She'd like all this to be done faster.

She knows that something happened with a knife, but that no one was hurt too badly. She tried to explain this early. She said, "Madam President" -- that worried child she kept trying to banish from her voice, but it still came back now and then. In that voice she hated she said, "Madam President, I- I didn't know any-" but Roslin was fixing her eyes at the ceiling, Roslin was already gone.

\--------------------------------------------

Tory dreams she has things to sign and no ink in her pens.

Sometimes she wakes up saying the words _I can't_. They always come from her without meaning to. She puts her hands over her ears, still wanting to finish _can't get no relief_, even though it sounds dumb and hollow. When this started, after the music but before something with a knife got her taken away, she had a fever for a while. This was probably brought on by stress. They weren't supposed to get sick, or something magic like that.

She didn't really know if this was true, but it sounded right, even though Sam kept telling her he had pneumonia the year before and he knew that memory was real. Did she remember that? She can vaguely see him coughing a bit in the cold, a long time ago, in a memory she also knows is real. He was coughing when he said _sons of bitches took my wife_. She didn't actually know his name before that day.

\--------------------------------------------

"I don't know what the frak you thought you were doing," Tigh hisses to her. It's more anger than she expected from him, but he cannot exactly clarify before everyone else's eyes are back and he has to keep his uniform and jaw straight. They'd moved her in a collar, for about three more days, to a different cell in the other brig. Comparatively, she is slightly less high-profile and dangerous now. This could also be a reward, like her toothbrush and a basin.

After three days they give her a phone cord and don't say why, but she knows as soon as she's holding it. Even though it's only breathing first, and it takes her finally saying "Sam?" to get a tired sob of acknowledgment, badly disguised as the word _yeah_.

This is the first time he asks her, "Why'd you give 'em my name?" His voice is wavering in a way she knows means he's in pain, and scared, and hiding it badly.

She's watching Roslin watch her. She says, "I had to tell the truth, Sam."

Since the initial arrest, she hasn't cried. It hasn't occurred to her to cry.

\--------------------------------------------

Tory understands -- this is practical thinking, something she'd considered from the beginning -- that in the last six days Sam went and negated everything she said, including that she herself was a Cylon, but that doesn't seem to have mattered.

She knows President Roslin is behind a glass somewhere, watching, when they move her back into the first cell again, the more severe-looking one. Which means giving Sam Anders back to her, or giving her back to him, something like that. Or there's just no room. She comes up with several different explanations -- in her work, she always made sure she could see the data at least four ways, and tailor the evidence accordingly to fit each.

The main evidence she goes on is: Anders, her Sam, is not speaking. It's not defiance, at least not anymore. He is staring into space with a trail of blood painted down his shoulder and one of the largest black eyes she's ever seen, rocking forward and back just a little, an inch or two. The word _sorry_ does not come to her naturally. What she says is, "Hi again." What she wants to say is _there must be some way-_ which would fit and might be funny.

She handled this pragmatically. The others had been in the military too long. Too many friends. They'd never accept Tigh as the enemy, not ever. They'd believe she was a liar and put her out the first airlock.

This is what happened: She gave them Anders' name first, and after that started lying.

\--------------------------------------------

The music is like a friend lately. After the chills and the fear and confusion, she was now able to appreciate each note of it, the poetry, the way it would echo in her bones when she let it in. Something pleasant in the verse that made nobles and servants move together; they collapsed all the ethnographic reports she could've made into chaos, but a pure and inevitable one. It made her imagine the world was coming open and everyone would take one step to the left and start new again. After everything, this seemed so beautiful and soothing.

She runs her fingers through Sam's hair and hums gently, kissing the song into his temple, as close as she can send the notes from her throat into him. She feels him succumb to this, the unnamable feeling of rightness, of home, for just the first few lines. Then his breath startles and the muscles in his neck tighten. He says the word, "No."

She sings through the rest anyway. In her arms she feels him shaking, but he makes no other move to stop her.

The other names she gave were: Helen Varick, Playa Palacios, and Cody Michaels. It wasn't quite arbitrary. There were things she remembered from civilian manifests -- no vital skill sets, deceased families that wouldn't miss them. And she doesn't think about them after that, ever, because it hurts for no reason. What she means is: there's nothing she can do anymore, so the hurt serves no purpose but its own existence.

"Do you always do that?" Sam asked her once. "Do you just make everybody into some chart or you can cross-reference sixty ways?"

"Of course I don't do it," she said, like he was half-crazy. "But honestly, Sam? I always _can_."

\--------------------------------------------

Her first time literally underground on New Caprica, she heard Sam Anders say, "I've been praying she's dead. With the alternatives, I mean. And if the gods are- you know." Wants to say _if the gods are listening_. Wants to say _if the gods are real at all_. When Tory winced and he remembered her presence there, he clarified, "She told me once- Kara, she- she knew she'd rather get shot and have it over than... what they might..." and rather than finish the sentence he forced down another drink. _They, they, they_. And Tory shook her head and lied, "No, of course, I understand." "This isn't a dance," Tigh said, and "this isn't a tea party." This is how he talked. Tory said, "Don't worry about me, Colonel."

\--------------------------------------------

"Samuel Anders," she says to him, his head in her lap. "Samuel T. Anders." His name is a prayer. She isn't religious. (She works with fanatics, and has always done well. "I want you to hear this," she told Sam once, regarding Galen Tyrol and his dead friend in the temple, his other dead friend who took three dozen traitors with him. "You don't deal with it a lot, Anders, but it's something you should know in this case."

Sam tilted his head, the way he does when she turns pro on him. "Okay," he said in a level voice that meant he might be smirking inside.

"Don't ever argue with someone who came to the gods through birth or politics. You argue around them."

"Right." She wanted to kiss him for no reason, for its own existence. He had Kara Thrace's dogtags wrapped around his knuckles and wrist, and in his nervous energy he would move them from one side to the other. She didn't kiss him. She told him a story about her first official campaign management position, and her system for ducking the Geminese with code words. He said, "I don't really think that's the same." And he said, "Okay.")

"Do you hear me?" she says now. He moans slightly. "Samuel T. Anders, you still haven't told me what it stands for."

"What?" because he wasn't listening for language; he was listening for her voice.

"Your middle name, tell me what it is." She expects him to say he doesn't know, the way she doesn't know the name of her best friend in elementary school -- she would've had one, wouldn't she? She would've had one if she'd gone. She would've had one if she was real. If not for the buzzing and the music and the glass walls watching.

He shifts even closer to her, like they're only drunk. She will store this in her mental composite of him. "Thomas."

"Boring," she says back. He smiles so suddenly it seems to almost hurt him. "Only Thomas? You made it sound so mysterious and important in the middle. I thought it was a god's name, Anders. Something expansive."

"Hey," he says in halfhearted offense, "it was my grandfather's name." They all say things like this, still, without thinking. "Be, you know," Sam adds -- wants to say "be nice." Even the other one, Tory thinks, Agathon with her pilot wings and ponytail hair, the old hand at all this, she slips sometimes. Anders once heard her say _back at the Academy_ like she was ever there.

Tory doesn't touch it because it's the closest to real sentences he's been in days. "I'm only saying, it surprises me. Boring old Sam-Tom Anders. I feel kind of cheated, baby." He says nothing. His eyes are closed now, forced closed. The grandfather not named Thomas. "I know," she says, "I know, I know." He leaves her lap and tries to vanish into the corner. She doesn't let him, keeps trying to put less space between them.

"I liked," he says after a while. This is all he says for a few seconds. Then: "I liked how it sounded in the press, just T."

"Me too. I think I would have."

"Why the frak-" he starts to ask again, and his voice gives out into tears there, which she hates exactly as much as he does.

"I couldn't give them," she whispers into his hair, "I couldn't give them Galen and..."

"I know."

"We're the ones who make sense to them, Sam. Tell me you see that." He doesn't answer. "And the others, I... they weren't anybody."

"They were people," he says. "That's more than we are."

She finally moves away like he slapped her, like she'd never look at him again if she had that choice.

\--------------------------------------------

Galen Tyrol, from Geminon, is career military. Long-term personnel type. He and his wife went out an airlock once, to save their lives, so it is with some authority he once told her, "It's not like it hurts. It's more... cold than anything else, then you're pretty well out. You don't feel too bad 'til later."

"Assuming there is a later," Anders had said. This is how they'd been joking, early on.

Another power Tory would like is: knowing what happens when you die. Resurrection still seems uncertain to her. At any rate, the _when_ you die aspect is currently troubling her, more than _after_ you die. One explanation for this is that she is a coward, that she could be somebody like frakking Baltar for the way she's been acting. She could justify that with the evidence if she had to. But this is going too negative -- nobody likes negative. There are many other ways around the data. Tory does not bend, does not surrender, she only thinks. She makes choices, backup plans.

\--------------------------------------------

They kissed, the first time, fairly close to the bar. He'd been drinking in everyone's sympathy, even though his leg later turned out to be a fracture, less broken than it seemed. Kara Thrace, appropriately, would turn out to be less dead. This would all turn out to be less.

He was drowsy and guilty afterward. He didn't have enough words for it. "I can't" was said several times, leaning back and away from her, like she was trying to trick him into something. He whispered "I can't" against her cheek and the heat in the room made her head spin.

This first time after they kissed, he softly grabbed her elbow, held onto it. This is a safety in sports terms -- she's seen enough pyramid to vaguely know about this. And he used it as a metaphor once, didn't he? Some time underground on New Caprica. This is when your hand is on the ball and in the center, and no one can touch you. Somewhere between total avoidance (let this ball go) and blind risk (run run run with it), while you make that choice, you're safe. That is how she imagined he was holding her elbow, making "I can't" not a definitive, but the instinct that comes moments before _now I can_. Until then, he would hold.

They made love clumsy. He couldn't have too much weight on his leg, more fractured than broken, but still fractured. He made tortured, lonely noises that she mistook for discomfort at first, but it was something else.

\--------------------------------------------

Sam wakes up urgently fumbling around his neck, then his pockets, for Kara's dogtags, which are gone now. This kind of confusion is brief lately, momentary. She sees dull resignation in his eyes when he looks at her.

"We belong here anyway, don't you think?" she says flatly this morning, to the question she imagines him asking again. "Where we can't do any damage? We're a threat to the whole human race as long as we're walking around, right?"

He nods slowly to this one and crosses his arms over himself. She doesn't mean it. She's trying to meet him on his field. She knows she could've done fine. She'd never hurt President Roslin or anyone else. She just worked the polls, set the tone, kept all the bullshit running smoothly so Laura could save the world. Tory was needed and did not belong here. She was needed, out of the cell.

Of all of them, she realizes now, Samuel Anders was probably needed the least. More in line with those other three names. Another militant body, another Viper jock, another macho widower striking out in the name of vengeance, he was on borrowed time at best.

That's a version of the answer she doesn't tell him, because it's the coldest thought she's ever had. She pushes it out of her mind and tries to pretend it was never there. She secretly thinks, sometimes, that she would've made a really good Cylon if the assholes had bothered to let her in on the joke.

\--------------------------------------------

"They're probably going to use us against each other," she tells him one day -- her watch says it's still number fourteen, which seems impossible -- and like magic that's when they start.

_Put you both out the airlock right now_ becomes _we'll toss him into space and ask you again_. It becomes _you can watch her lose every bone in that hand_, even when this is an empty threat, even when it comes from Colonel Tigh who never looks them in the eye and is indirectly begging -- and finally granted -- to never be put in charge of interrogation again.

It becomes separation, most of the time, during which Tory watches her tiny electronic calendar and wants to control time, wants him back faster, but they're not as interested in her lies anymore. Tory imagines this is harder on Sam. Alone in the cell she thinks of him in a bloody, fetal heap all over again, needing her to make his mind steady. She doesn't know if this is real. She does know he has a few more bruises every time they're back together, and he acts like he is fine even though he must have given them something, some truth or lie about the Cylons that broke a little piece of him away, in order to be with her again.

It is always harder on him because he resists more than she does. He resists _differently_, like a guerilla, fighting in the moment without a clear exit.

And maybe he worries -- it only occurs to her once, when he stares too long at a little gash on her forehead where she fell from her cot, dreaming again about paper. Maybe he thinks he is the chivalrous knight who must stay with her to save her from some catastrophe. This may also be true. Another power she'd like is: absorbing other people's fantasies when she hears them, like they are hers.

\--------------------------------------------

He asks a later time, why.

She says, "I didn't want to be alone."

\--------------------------------------------

They hold hands when they're asleep.


End file.
